INTELLIGENT MOBILE TECHNOLOGY
While the specific process you employ
will be unique to your campus, the
important thing is ensuring cross-
divisional and cross-functional committee
representation. Use the resulting
guidelines to establish connectivity and
security policies in IT. Then automate
implementation with a robust policy
management and access control system
capable of operating at scale. If your
institution lacks such a system, invest in
one this year.
Deploying fast, context-aware
Wi-Fi in all environments
To cover all the bases, pursue a robust
and cost-effective strategy to ensure
your wireless and wired infrastructure
covers all the bases. More institutions
will take advantage of Wave 2 802.11ac
infrastructure and its performance
innovations, including multi-user multiple
input and multiple output and four
spatial streams. In a nutshell, Wave 2
access points can transmit to multiple
client devices using different streams,
thus increasing network utilisation and
enabling higher device densities to support
quality user experiences.
Advanced indoor and outdoor Wave
2 access points also incorporate the
Bluetooth low energy technology necessary
for location-based services. This offers
opportunities to maximise hardware
deployment budgets versus installing
separate BLE gear.
Additionally, adopting multi-gigabit
Ethernet edge switches will provide
needed immediate performance gains and
assist you with network future proofing.
Multi-gigabit switches resulted from
work by the NBASE-T and MGBASE-T
technology alliances, which the IEEE
utilised to create the recently released
802.3bz specification.
Essentially, the new specification
enables deploying the highest-
performance Wave 2 APs over existing
Cat 5e, Cat 6 cabling, at a significant
savings over re-wiring. Some solutions
can even automatically detect and
provide the proper connection such as 1,
2.5, 5 or 10GigE.
Trends in the field of higher education
IoT spreads institution-wide
IoT is swiftly expanding beyond
student devices. The onslaught ranges
from connected lights, door locks and
sprinkler systems to laboratory sensors,
classroom instruction and student
laundry machines, with ever-more
introductions in sight.
Everyone expects always-
on experiences
All of your campus constituencies
expect speedy performance from
their devices and apps, enabling them
to work, teach and learn seamlessly
indoors and out.
Spaces become intelligent and
context-aware
Context-aware mobility is about adding
intelligence to spaces so that the
space interacts with you. For example,
when a professor walks into a room,
Predicting network behaviour
and enabling intelligent
responses
To continue meeting escalating
expectations, higher education IT
departments will begin deploying
management equipment with built-
in intelligence to automatically make
adjustments as networking requirements
shift on a day-to-day basis. Advanced
management solutions incorporate
machine learning to adjust and optimise
the entire network – not just a group
of access points or a certain area of
campus – which is especially important
in dense environments.
In addition to dynamically managing
the network, the latest solutions also add
the resilience and persistence needed
for students, faculty and staff to move
seamlessly between indoor and outdoor
spaces while maintaining connectivity
throughout. These innovations supply
new redundancy technologies to ensure
hardware or software outages are
the configuration of equipment and
amenities can now adjust automatically
to that individual’s profile.
Wearables, location-awareness
breathe life into retention
It is only a matter of time before
institutions begin leveraging data
collected from mobile devices
and networks as students move
about campus.
Virtual reality in classrooms
takes hold
Wider access to commodity virtual
reality or augmented reality innovations
is moving the technology out of research
labs and into classrooms.
All environments will be dense
Device density is not limited to lecture
halls anymore, but extends to dorm
rooms, cafeterias, sports fields.
completely transparent to end users, even
in the highest-performance applications
such as video conferencing and Voice over
Wi-Fi calling.
Modernising affordability
To make networking updates affordable,
institutions can continue to use phased
and tiered approaches, where use cases
match the corresponding equipment. For
example, re-deploying your existing Wave
1 802.11ac APs to non-public facilities
spaces, where reliability is critical but
device density is low, may be sufficient in
the short run.
No matter what your institution’s
specific situation, you have more mobility
options and innovations to choose from
than ever before. This makes it an exciting
time in mobile connectivity as higher
education organisations can offer their
constituencies enhanced capabilities and
experiences to improve environments,
increase operational efficiencies and help
achieve educational outcomes.
45